Halloween Horror

Last Halloween, according to some, we traumatized our young son by putting him in a pumpkin.

As you can see from the following picture, he quite liked the pumpkin


This year, Erin wouldn't let me put him in a pumpkin, and yet another annual family tradition fizzles.

Sticking with our theme of "Last Halloween" here's a shot of Joseph in his 2007 costume:


We’re still not sure whether he was a baby duck or a baby chick, but either way he looked pretty cute…at least that’s what we thought.

Joseph seems to feel that his costume from 2007 made him look “fat,” and he doesn’t really like it when we show the pictures to other people.

So this year we were determined to find a costume that de-emphasized Joseph’s cheeks. After polling family members and sifting through various websites, we settled on this costume:

Joseph, the Triceratops

From this picture you might think that Joseph loved his costume the moment he slipped it on, but you'd be wrong.

The following images--taken within seconds of the above photo--show his true first impression of his 2008 Halloween costume.

Get this off of me!

Why did you put THIS on my head?

We tried to re-assure Joseph that his costume was in fact very cool by showing him what he looked like in the mirror.


Far from having the desired effect of soothing his troubled soul, all we succeeded in doing was dredging up insecurities about his weight from last Halloween.


He turned to his father for escape, but all I did was point a camera at him.


I tried to re-assure Joseph that his costume didn't make him weigh more, but he didn't believe me.



OK, so maybe that wasn't a very accurate description of Joseph's inner thoughts. But, as you can clearly tell from the photos, he really didn't like his costume when he first tried it on--but he wasn't so traumatized that he forgot about how much he likes to stomp on the bathroom scale.

Fast forward to yesterday at Nana & Grandpa's house, where all of Joseph's Toddster-cousins (minus Kristen--Feel better soon!!) are wearing their Halloween costumes for the Halloween party at Nana's church.

Suddenly, wearing a costume isn't so bad after all:


After a few moments of observation, Joseph quickly got caught up in the fun of wearing his costume with all of the other cousins:



Here's a shot of all of the cousins together in costume

From L-R we have: A proud Ninja, Elphaba the Witch, an out-of-position Triceratops, another Witch, and 50-Cent dressed up as Darth Vader.

Here's another group shot, this time with Grandpa corralling the roaming Triceratops:

(Grandpa is dressed up as a guy pretending like he didn't have heart surgery two days ago)

Joseph never once tried to take off his costume--although the claw-mittens on his hands did interfere with his ability to pick up candy.


Once we got to the Halloween Party, he loved running around and checking out all the kids' costumes. He even pulled out a few new dance moves, but it was too dark to get any pictures.


Joseph had gone his whole life (all 17 months) without really ever eating candy. We gave him some last night and he giggles when he tastes it. Not wanting to tempt him too much, I'm planning on eating the rest of his candy by tomorrow.